The sight of an airplane soaring above me used to make my eyes sting with longing. At that point, I used to be a school dropout, a 52-pound brittle skeleton, years of anorexia having gnawed me right down to little greater than organs and skin.
Whenever I heard the planes, I might look up on the sky and picture the people up there, busy living life, probably flying to vital business meetings and conferences in Hong Kong or Los Angeles, or whatever vital things individuals who aren’t dying of an eating disorder do. And I might stop to clutch on the visceral ache in my chest, remembering the times once I dreamed of becoming a journalist who traveled the world.
Twenty years later, I’m doing exactly that. I write long-form stories from world wide. I’m now that busy person on the plane, flying to meetings and conferences. I’ve ridden on horseback within the jungles of Burma to report on an unconventional humanitarian aid organization; flown a two-passenger airplane over the ice kingdoms of distant Alaska to report on Alaska Natives; driven past giraffes and gazelles grazing in open fields while reporting on missions to Chinese migrants in Kenya.
I’m finally living the dream that gave the impression of a fantasy 20 years ago, once I had lost all purpose and meaning in life. But now, pregnant with my second child, I’m giving it as much as be a stay-at-home mother, for who knows how long—and I’m not okay.
I know the way incredibly privileged I’m to have the choice to not work. I also understand it’s a blessing to have children when so many ladies struggle with infertility and miscarriage. So it’s with some shame that I confess: I’m petrified of the upcoming transition from working mother to stay-at-home mother.
I actually have nursed this dream to do what I do today for therefore long, and worked so hard to get here, that giving it up now looks like time has abruptly stopped while I’m mid-somersault in a gymnastics routine, frozen in motion, a body stuck in a stiff coil within the air, at all times falling, never landing.
When I shared this struggle with my discipleship group, our leader—a girl with three grown-up children, who gave up a possible nursing profession to be a full-time mother—clicked her tongue. “I do know what’s the issue,” she said. “You’re the everyday modern woman.”
She’s right. I’m indeed a stereotypical modern woman who bristles at stereotypical gender roles. I profess to support women striving for his or her dreams, whether engineering, piloting, or homemaking—but truth be told, until recently, I couldn’t understand women who selected motherhood as their vocation.
Becoming a mother was never a part of my dream. I didn’t buy the dominant message that ladies can do all of it. The math didn’t make sense: You can’t give 100% to your profession and one other 100% to motherhood. I selected profession, obviously; I didn’t think I had an oz of maternal instinct. Even the chubbiest, rosiest baby didn’t make me need to coo. Why would I would like to take one home with me?
The conversation about womanhood and motherhood often seems to fall into tiring cultural wars over tropes, not real women: One side declares a girl free to do whatever she wants, to follow her own heart (whilst we all know our hearts are as volatile, unpredictable, and inconsistent as my toddler).
The other side says women like me have swallowed “diabolical lies” about womanhood. They say a girl’s highest or biggest calling is to be a wife and mother. They say the feminist movement has deceived women into believing that a profession can fulfill us and that housewifery is bland and suffocating.
True, society doesn’t rejoice homemakers enough, which might make women who decide to stay at home feel dismissed and small. It explains the rise of “trad wives,” a social media phenomenon wherein women refuse to apologize for his or her aprons and as a substitute proudly reclaim the “traditional” values of womanhood, which they interpret as staying home to cook, clean, and look after their family, often through aesthetically pleasing vintage filters.
Neither side speaks to me. And these aren’t the type of conversations I actually have with other women who struggle to feel fulfilled in motherhood or profession.
Yes, I suppose I’m that “typical modern woman.” But there’s something more. Those delicious hours I spent as a baby filling notebooks with ideas and stories weren’t feminist roars but an innate expression of a creative God, who blessed each men and girls to create and cultivate. I didn’t go to work enthusiastic about toppling patriarchy or earning wealth or social status. I worked because I loved it.
But then that modified. Our son, growing in my womb for months before I finally noticed him, began kicking. And before I ever felt able to be a mother, two years ago, he was born with an indignant cry.
Thanks to California’s paid family leave advantages, I used to be capable of take 4 months of maternity leave. The 122 days of taking good care of my son full-time blurred into one fuzzy, sleep-deprived daze soaked within the cloying scents of sweet breast milk and milky belches. I couldn’t tell when the sun rose and when it set.
But I also never knew such tenderness. The love that bloomed inside me was no honeymoon rose, fresh and perky one season, droopy and faded the subsequent. It just kept growing, an enchanted ivy that danced evergreen and plush. I observed this budding love with awe and journalistic curiosity: Did my body really create this magical creature? How can something so scrunchy and wrinkly look so sweet and pleasant in my eyes?
I couldn’t imagine life without our son, couldn’t imagine how I could have ever desired a life without him. And yet—I used to be also bored out of my mind. I couldn’t wait to return to work. My first day back from maternity leave, I dusted my desk and sat down with a steaming—not lukewarm—cup of coffee, and felt like I had been gifted a vacation. I felt, in so some ways, liberated. My intellect, stiff from neglect, could now explore things beyond tummy times and wake windows.
But I also got here back a unique person. I felt older, crankier, slower. My creativity was stuffy and sniffly like a persistent cold. My focus was off, all my senses overstimulated by a baby greedy for food, touch, attention—the whole lot and greater than I had to provide.
Traveling for a reporting trip became a logistic scramble of pumping and labeling a freezer’s value of breastmilk, prepping two weeks of healthy meals, paying the nanny for extra hours, and sometimes flying grandparents cross-country to assist out.
Figuring out a technique to keep my milk supply was stressful. Once, I used to be stuck within the backseat between two grown men in a bulletproof truck for a 10-hour drive across the fields of war-torn Ukraine. We stopped for a fast lunch, and I raced to the restroom, frantically attempting to manually pump a full load into the toilet sink.
It affected my marriage. Seeing my husband’s exhausted, haggard face during our video calls once I was overseas made me feel each guilty and irritated. When I returned home, travel-weary, my husband greeted me with the relief of a drowning man spotting a raft after which paddled madly away, leaving me within the waters to make up for my parenting slack.
I like our son fiercely, deeply. But I don’t find motherhood fulfilling; and yet work doesn’t feel fulfilling either. Perhaps it never was, because even before I became a mother, I remember spending each birthday feeling anxious as one other 12 months passed, my 20s receding into my late 30s, feeling as hungry as I had been back with anorexia, with the hole dissatisfaction that I used to be not as completed or as influential as I desired to be.
Fulfillment is such a first-world, Twenty first-century problem to fret about, something we hear often: Is my marriage fulfilling? Is my profession fulfilling? Is my friendship fulfilling? When I had nothing but bones, what I do now felt like the celebrities, the galaxy, the universe.
Now I actually have the celebrities and galaxy—plus the unexpected, unasked-for gift of motherhood—and it still doesn’t feel like enough.
If the reply to that is that I’m brainwashed by modern feminism and that I just have to recuperate the “real” meaning of womanhood, then that’s just piling shame upon shame, misleading me from one false illusion to a different. I’ve seen many stay-at-home moms compare their children and parenting to that of others, after which sink into an identity crisis when the youngsters will not be all right or once they leave for faculty.
This shouldn’t be a female problem. It’s a human problem.
Most men appear to get each worlds—fatherhood and a profession. Nobody criticizes them for pursuing their ambitions, and everybody praises them for taking the youngsters to the park. We also don’t hear as many men discuss sacrificing profession for family, and that’s a shame. I do know an acquaintance who was too busy constructing his company to quiet down, and now, almost in his 50s, wealthy and successful, he’s dating women of their 20s because he dearly wants children. It may need benefited him to think concerning the sacrifices of pursuing his ambitions sooner.
A whole lot of what I desire is sweet. I used to be made within the image of a Creator. I used to be made to create, which incorporates children, but not only children; and work and motherhood were never meant to satisfy me. Before humans ever began procreating or cultivating, God was already delighted in them and called them “superb,” simply for being. He created humankind already fulfilled in him. Fruitfulness and dominion is a blessing, an added bonus.
That’s how the Bible begins, with Genesis 1 and a pair of. The problem is that I’m trapped repeating the story of Genesis 3 time and again.
I used to be feeling insecure, exhausted, and dissatisfied once I recently reread Genesis 3. God opened my eyes, and I saw myself. I saw the Serpent distort God’s Word, twist God’s character, and implant doubt and temptation in my mind: Is God really good? Am I actually content? I saw myself standing within the midst of all of the fruits I could eat within the garden, yet fixating on the one fruit God prohibited. The garden, with all its overflowing, self-replenishing abundance, was not enough. God was not enough. I wanted that fruit.
It’s the sin of pride. It’s pride that sets these ever-climbing expectations for myself, pride that measures my value by what I produce. But I’ll never be satisfied, because I do know too well how far I fall short, what number of persons are higher than me, after which I feel the shame and fear of being exposed. I may not be ravenous myself to death anymore, but the identical toxic mixture of pride and shame that developed into an eating disorder still courses through my veins.
Genesis 3 isn’t a story from way back. It’s current reality. It is the engine through which this world operates, the best way I operate.
When my second child is born, I’ll deal with motherhood for an indefinite season, because that is the season wherein God has called me to be faithful. I’ll repeat the cycles of breastfeeding, rocking, and burping, and it’ll feel dull and monotonous.
I’ll attempt to be faithful, but I’ll likely feel resentful. My back will ache and my brain will creak. I’ll fight every urge to not get impatient with my toddler and husband, and sometimes lose. I’ll get bored. I is not going to feel enough, and I’ll need to seek achievement in something—until I remind myself of the garden, and that Genesis 3 shouldn’t be the top of the story.
There’s fresh grace on this upcoming season. Maybe I shouldn’t think it unfair that ladies are likely to struggle more with the sacrifices of profession and motherhood. Maybe it’s a blessing, because this transition from working mother to stay-at-home mother will poke and stretch me in places tender and sore, jolting me from operating out of my usual system, to reflect on and reform old patterns of thoughts into recent ones.
There’s nothing dull or monotonous about that.
Sophia Lee is global staff author at Christianity Today.
